They Got Away
by Sara Schaff
The couple had come to see the used car. Donna was showing the car because her brother, who owned the car, could not be there to show it. He was in a nursing home, and she was the one to put him there.
She attempted a smile at the young people at the door: a woman and man in their twenties, pale and smooth as babies. The woman held an actual baby in her arms. The child smiled and drooled in a way that upset Donna as much as her brother’s newly shaven head had when she’d first arrived at the house. (Surgery, for a brain tumor.)
“Okay if we take it for a drive?” the woman said.
“Sure,” Donna said. She stepped onto the porch and gestured for them to follow her to the garage.
“The black flies sure are terrible here,” the woman said, swatting at the air. She wore jean shorts and a tank top, and her face was utterly unremarkable. Donna thought how she would not be able to describe it to anyone.
Donna herself had been a beauty once. She despised the way people exclaimed when they saw old photos of her. They perceived loss, where she saw growth. She still prided herself on her strong nose and cheekbones. She didn’t waste time lamenting her wrinkles or the way her once-black hair had gone completely white. Today, in spite of the heat, she was wearing her usual uniform: high-waisted jeans and a black turtleneck. A long gold pendant from Bangalore. Abe was waiting for her there now, and together they would go to their property in the countryside, those glorious green hills, with the veranda that looked out on them.
Donna opened the garage door, and there it was, her brother’s Ford: barely driven, but somehow still a bucket of junk.
“My brother says it’s in great shape,” she said.
“I’ll see about that,” the man said.
He did not smile. Him Donna felt prepared to describe: very tall, taller than her Abe, with a handsome, firm jaw. But skinny as hell, and a haunted look in his eyes.
Maybe that was just Donna. She thought all Americans looked haunted now. She couldn’t wait to leave the country. But before she could leave it, she had to sell not just the car but this house, their mother’s house and all of the things in it, all the years of accumulated life. Her mother was dead, and her brother would probably—hopefully—be dead soon, too.
If she said it aloud to anyone, she knew how it would sound. She did not say it aloud.
She handed the keys to the man, who looked for a long moment at the woman. Not a nice look, Donna thought.
They both turned to Donna.
“Do you mind if the baby and I wait inside with you?” the woman asked. “It’s just, the flies here are so bad. I don’t want her getting bitten.”
“Of course, be my guest.” Donna looked around the driveway. It had just occurred to her there was no other car, no car seat for the baby.
The woman seemed to notice Donna noticing and shrugged. “We walked from town.”
The man climbed into the car and started the engine.
The woman held the baby’s chubby arm up to wave at the car as it lurched out of the wooded drive, trailing exhaust. She smiled at Donna. “We finally got fed up with having no wheels. This goddamn place, you can’t get anywhere without a car.” She opened her eyes wide, and Donna finally got a look at the color of them: light brown. “Sorry, excuse my language.”
“No, it’s all right.” It did always give Donna a shock to come back here and find no good public transportation. She gestured for the woman and baby to follow her.
“It’s nice of you.”
Everywhere Donna and Abe had gone in the world, people had invited them in. Oman, for example—now that was a spectacular country, with the kindest people. Americans were always surprised to hear that, a reaction that both irritated and pleased her. After having dinner in one family’s home, a family they’d just met hours earlier when their little car broke down on the way to a campsite, Abe had said, “Let’s live here for a while.” And so they had.
“I’ll make us tea,” Donna said.
“I don’t really drink tea.”
“Water?”
“Okay.”
While Donna filled a glass and put on the kettle, the woman looked around the kitchen, where every surface was covered: glasses, pottery, dishware.
“We just had a yard sale,” Donna said. “That’s why there’s nowhere to sit.”
“Didn’t anyone come?”
“A lot of people came, not a lot of people bought anything. This is what’s left—almost everything except the table and chairs.”
Donna led the woman and baby into the living room, with its tall windows overlooking the Adirondacks. But you couldn’t see the mountains anymore, because her brother had let the trees in the backyard get overgrown. Donna liked the jungly feel of wild greenery; she had welcomed it in their garden-filled homes outside of Chiang Mai and outside of Bogotá, but here she missed seeing the jagged horizon and how it opened the world by slicing it roughly in half. Now, with the skies as gray as they had been for the entire month since she’d been back, the world felt small and isolated.
The woman was already looking through the jewelry on a glass coffee table with the price tag still on it: $100. Donna had loved that table as a child, even though as a baby she’d crawled straight into one corner and got a cut on her forehead so bad she needed stitches; she still had a scar. Over the phone, Abe had suggested, gently, that perhaps she was asking too much.
“You have nice things,” the woman said.
“No one wants antiques anymore, no matter how nice.”
The woman held up a strand of pearls, and the baby reached for it.
“Those are the only real ones of the bunch. The rest are costume.” It occurred to Donna the woman might try to steal them, and she regretted identifying the valuable pearls. “Anyway, they were my mother’s, back when people loved that sort of thing.”
“Oh, I see.” The woman returned the pearls to their velvet case. “Why you selling it all?”
“There’s no one here for it. My husband and I live abroad. He’s waiting for me in Bangalore right now.”
“Is that in India?”
“Yes.”
Frankly, Donna was surprised the woman knew. She realized she could be judgmental about her hometown. The first time someone called Donna a hick, it was summer, and she and her brother were seven and eleven. How she adored her brother then! She followed him everywhere, and he let her, even though she was a pest. That day they were goofing off downtown, jumping on and off a stone wall next to the gas station, when some slick teenagers in a shiny blue convertible slowed down, and Donna heard one of the boys in the back say, “Ask the hicks for directions.”
Donna had heard the word before, but about kids she went to school with. (Her mother trotted it out during arguments with her father about where they lived.) She felt ashamed. Her brother’s face flushed red, but he’d been polite as he explained how to get from there to the highway.
One of the boys in the car said, “Don’t you think we better ask someone who looks like they know something?” And someone else said, “We’re not going to find them here,” and everyone guffawed.
When the teenagers went inside the gas station together, Donna’s brother kicked the taillight of their car so hard it broke, and so did his big toe. They ran home together, laughing and limping. She bandaged up his toe at home, and he called her his little nurse.
The young woman was talking. “I wanted to live in Asia once,” she said.
Another surprise. “Where in Asia?”
“Anywhere really. I was in sixth grade, and our teacher was telling us about these little mountain villages in China. Tiny houses made of wood, like tree houses. And no roads! I’m sure it’s not really like that, but it sounded magical.”
“In some places it really is still like that.”
The woman smiled, and even though her teeth were crooked and yellow, it changed something in her face. She looked like a different person than the one Donna met at the door. Someone Donna would describe as pretty. The baby patted its mother’s face. She kissed its little fingers and laughed. “I only ever wanted to get away. And here I am, stuck.” She said it to the baby, in a baby voice, then glanced around the living room. “I don’t mean here. You have a pretty house. I wouldn’t mind being stuck here.”
Donna thought about her task. She couldn’t be with her Abe until it was done. “I am stuck here!” she said. “It’s not so fun.”
The baby started fussing. Little tears leaked down its fat red cheeks. The woman made a face. “I’m sorry, is there somewhere you wouldn’t mind me changing his diaper?”
Donna was not pleased about this development, but she wasn’t sure what to do. Sit with this stranger and her stinky infant? How long was this test drive going to take, anyway?
Donna showed the woman to the smaller bathroom off her brother’s room. She’d just cleaned the main bathroom and didn’t want to mess it up. The woman closed the door and Donna listened to the clicking of the lock, then the baby whimpering. “Shhh, shh…” the woman hushed.
Donna stood still for a moment in the bedroom, feeling dizzy. The wood paneling on the walls was the same as it had been when they were children, when she and her brother shared this room. Only one twin bed remained, and it was a hospital bed, made so her brother could push a button and lie down or sit up. He usually remained lying down. She would have to throw everything in here away. It smelled of death still, even though her brother was, by some cruel miracle, still alive.
In the bathroom, the toilet flushed, the baby laughed, and Donna almost ran to the hall so the woman would not find her in the room, waiting.
Beatrice, the woman who cleaned the house for Donna’s brother and made him weekly meals, had quit when he moved into the nursing home. Donna had begged Beatrice to stay to help clean everything, but Beatrice was too angry. “He wanted to die at home,” she’d said. “That’s all he wanted.”
If Beatrice, who was seventy-five, had not been married, Donna thought she might have moved in with Donna’s brother. She’d loved him since they were children, and she had continued to flirt with him mercilessly while tending to him in his decline. Oh, and you bet he flirted back, even doped up on all his pain meds. Beatrice might have even married him if it weren’t for her simple, lazy husband, calling her throughout the day to ask where to find more toilet paper or coffee. He couldn’t manage without her. It was really too bad: marrying Donna’s brother would have worked out nicely for Beatrice, since the man was both rich and a fool.
The tea kettle was shrieking. It must have been going off for a long time and Donna didn’t hear. She padded to the kitchen and turned off the stove. She filled two teacups, even though she couldn’t remember now if the woman said she wanted tea or not.
For a moment, she just stood with the warm mug of tea in her hands, listening. The house felt even quieter now than she was used to. She couldn’t hear the baby whimpering or cooing anymore, or its mother trying to soothe it.
Now she got a bad feeling. Leaving her tea, she walked quickly to the back bedroom. There, she found the one tall window wide open. She looked out and saw a tiny sock in the dirt. It was not a long drop. Her brother had climbed in and out of the window all the time as a teenager looking for somewhere else to go. Eventually, Donna had moved into the former guest room at the front of the house, against her mother’s wishes, and it was where she slept still. She wouldn’t think of sleeping in their mother’s old room, no matter how large and grand. The walls of it had absorbed decades of smoke from Chesterfelds and Camels. The mattress smelled like their mother’s gardenia perfume and made Donna’s eyes water.
Donna looked: the bathroom was empty.
“Hello?” Donna called. “Hello, Miss?”
She hurried back into the living room, certain what she would find. But the pearls were still in their box. All the unwanted things remained.
That feeling in her throat? Panic. She hadn’t felt it in a long time. Stupid people like Beatrice assumed living in a place like Bangalore was full of everyday frights, but Donna loved it. She’d loved everywhere she’d ever lived that was supposed to terrify her.
Anyone she’d known in town before was either dead or so strange to her now she wouldn’t know what to say to them. So Donna called Beatrice, and Beatrice came right away. She lived just up the hill. She could walk down the path that criscrossed the wooded back-ends of their properties, but she always drove, which Donna found lazy.
Beatrice did not bother knocking, just strode right in, mumbling in righteous displeasure. Her wobbly jowls and watery brown eyes made her look like a sweet hound dog, so anything mean Beatrice would inevitably say always came as a shock. She swept right past Donna into the back bedroom. Donna followed meekly. In the bathroom, Beatrice opened the trash, and the smell of the diaper hit them before they saw it. Beatrice held her nose theatrically, then opened the medicine cabinet and clucked her tongue.
“I knew it. All gone.”
“What’s gone?”
“What do you think? All Danny’s meds.” Donna hated how Beatrice still called him Danny, like he was a little boy.
“But why?”
Beatrice turned around. She had not had her hair set yet this week, and Donna felt embarrassed on her behalf; Beatrice’s gray curls were frizzed around her head in wiry clouds. The resentment coming off Beatrice was thicker than usual.
“Donna, she’s probably addicted. Or trying to sell the stuff.”
“Oh.”
“You might not be aware there’s an epidemic up here. My sister’s grandkid even.” Her voice trembled.
“Kellan?”
Beatrice nodded. Her eyes filled.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
Donna always felt Beatrice was jealous that Donna had gotten away while she had stuck around, but what did she know? Beatrice cared about family in a way that Donna didn’t—or couldn’t, really. She’d been relieved to hear that at least she voted for Hillary Clinton.
“Donna, you need to call the police.”
“Do I?”
Beatrice stared. “Don’t be stupid, Dizzy.” The old nickname. Donna winced.
She glanced at the phone. That ancient rotary phone, in a shade of past-ripe avocado. Oddly, it was a thing that comforted her, even if the house didn’t. She still couldn’t get used to her cell phone, and she couldn’t get a signal here anyway; Abe and everyone around them in Bangalore had been using cell phones for years. Meanwhile, Donna held onto vivid memories of whispering into the receiver in this very kitchen, talking to Imelda, another friend who got away, then died in Los Angeles from skin cancer ten years ago. Imelda was the only one who had believed her about what happened.
“Well?” Beatrice said, impatient.
Now Donna remembered the man. Who went out driving her brother’s car. Oh god. She could see the whole plan now. That woman had gone off somewhere to meet him, and they were driving off together in a stolen bunch of junk. Have an adventure, live their young lives, ruin them.
Donna picked up the receiver. “I’ll handle it,” she said. “I’ll let you know if I need any help.”
She wanted Beatrice to leave. She didn’t care about the shitty car. She didn’t care about the drugs. Why couldn’t the woman have taken the jewelry after all? She just wanted to be rid of everything and to never come back.
“Have it your way,” Beatrice said. “You always do.”
Donna didn’t think that deserved a response, and so she didn’t give one.
Once she could no longer hear Beatrice’s car, she put down the receiver. What business did she have calling the police—country twats at best, thuggish mobster wannabes at worst (and often).
For the longest time, her father had been the exception that proved the rule. Retired by the time she and her brother were in elementary school, he was a quiet and careful man. Donna begged him for stories of daring and danger, but he said the only danger he ever got in was when he slipped on the ice downtown while chasing after a kid who’d stolen his police bicycle.
Only when he was drunk would he tell what Donna once thought the most daring of all stories: when he arrested a man who’d broken into this very house, when it was still her mother’s family’s summer home.
Donna’s father was doing his morning patrol on the road down the hill, and he saw a light on in the living room. He knew the family was in the city until July, so he paid a call and found this man who claimed to be a family friend, camped out in the master bedroom, drinking the house gin. While Donna’s father called the family to confirm, the man tried to flee out the very window the woman had just gone through with her baby, but Donna’s father caught him and brought him in to the city jail.
That summer, the family asked him to dinner, and though he was twenty-five years older than Donna’s mother, he fell in love at first sight. The way she held her wine glass to her lips just ruined him apparently, and so did the way she pulled at the pearls around her pretty neck while her parents talked to him about crime in the city and how it was getting worse, but they didn’t expect it to happen here in the Adirondacks.
Donna’s father waited a year for her mother to graduate from high school, then asked her to marry him on a Fourth of July, while fireworks bloomed over the lake. She said yes—and as she would tell her kids throughout their childhood and long after her husband died—would regret it for the rest of her life.
The clock said it was almost dinner time, but Donna had no appetite. Her tea had gone cold, and she drank it while standing at the open fridge, staring at rows of Tupperware filled with casseroles people had brought over for her brother. The fridge was starting to smell of rot. She closed the door.
She rarely felt hungry enough to make food for herself. In every place she had lived abroad with Abe, they had been able to afford a cook. He studied the impact of climate change and urbanization on bird populations, and for years she had taught math in international schools when there was a position open nearby. She didn’t think of themselves as fancy, but she’d gotten used to delicious meals she didn’t lift a finger for. She hated to tell Americans that. Maybe she was fancy. Maybe it was genetic. Her brother had followed their dad into the police department, then branched out into real estate development. He called Donna an elitist hypocrite, even though he’d hired Beatrice to clean his house long before he could no longer do it himself.
Donna decided she would read in bed. Who cared what time she fell asleep or woke up? At 4am, the world felt almost unbearably perfect with potential: dark, silent, no news. Thinking about opening her eyes into that world made her shiver with rare happiness.
The sound of tires on gravel made her turn toward the screen door, where the black flies swarmed. They had never locked their doors here, which explained why it was so easy for that man to get into her grandparents’ bedroom years earlier, but now she was filled with an urge to slip the hook into the latch. Her fingers touched the metal just as the man’s face beamed at her from the porch steps. Behind him, her brother’s car idled, the driver’s door still open, the radio turned to the local station and blasting the weather report for the evening (rain, at last).
“Where is she?” he shouted. “Where is she?”
The question surprised her more than the anger. Donna tried to keep her voice steady. “Not here.”
“Goddamn it, you’re hiding her!”
“Why would I do that?”
It was a genuine question that the man apparently had no answer for. He started to weep openly, not bothering to cover his face. Donna was both moved and frightened. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Her brother had wept the night he crawled into her bed, drunk and agitated. He’d snuck back home through the window, from a party his friends were having in the woods. He wouldn’t say what happened there. He was fifteen-years-old. As children, they’d often slept in one bed, comforted by the other’s warm breaths. But that night as he lifted her nightgown and began pressing the flesh of her belly and thighs, his sour breath on her neck turned her stomach. When she screamed, her brother fled to his own bed, and her father came running. “What happened?” he said, “What happened, Donna-bear?”
“She had another one of her nightmares,” her brother said. And that became the story, even when Donna later told her parents what actually happened.
Now the man on her porch let out a scream so primal Donna felt it vibrate in her chest. His shoulders collapsed, she thought he might fall into a heap on her porch. But instead he straightened, and all the hauntedness in his face condensed into a hard, terrifying mask.
“That bitch,” he said. He was looking straight at Donna.
He strode toward the door and pushed on it before she could get the latch straight in her fingertips. The force made her stumble back. She thought she would fall, but he caught her arm and yanked her toward him.
“You helped her,” he said. “You helped that bitch get away.”
“I wish I had.”
His fingers curled around her neck.
“Shut up.”
Donna knew it didn’t matter whether she’d stayed quiet or not. She also knew that what had happened to her—what was happening to her now—was not the worst thing that ever happened in the world. When she said that to Abe the first time, he looked sadder than she’d ever seen him.
The man’s fingers were rough and dry on her throat. He was saying something she couldn’t understand. Then she felt a darkness behind her eyelids. She could hear Abe’s voice, telling her to come to bed.
Minutes or hours later, the sound of sirens rushed into the driveway; the darkness turned a shade of pulsing blue.
“Shit,” Donna heard the man say before the pressure on her neck released.
She fell back hard on her sit bones. A sharp pain flashed up and down her body. Still, she felt grateful. Thank you, Beatrice, she thought, a thing she’d never thought before in her life. Beatrice was not the kind of person who generally inspired gratitude in Donna, and neither were the police.
She made herself small. She wanted to scream now, but screaming would get her nowhere.
“Are you okay, Ma’m?” said a voice. The voice sounded kind. Donna still didn’t want to open her eyes.
When she felt a gentle pressure on her arm, helping her up, she thought of the tenderness Abe showed so easily every day when he brought her tea to her in bed, then left her to drink it in peace. He always called her Great Blue, or just Blue, after her favorite bird and the color of her eyes, which were milky now from her cataracts. Someone’s hand was on her elbow now, holding her steady. She imagined curling into the great warmth of Abe’s smile when he welcomed her home.
Sara Schaff is the recipient of awards from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. The author of the story collections The Invention of Love (Split/Lip Press) and Say Something Nice About Me (Augury Books), her writing has appeared in LitHub, Yale Review Online, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Find more of her work at saraschaff.com.